"...many voters said they liked McCain's support for expanded offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico -- a concrete sign that he has a plan to deal with their most pressing concerns."

it truly amazes me how people can still be duped by bullshit like this. do they not believe the TV when it tells them expanded offshore drilling will do nothing in the short term?

this post should not be titled mccain's exurban woes; it should be obama's problem with nuance. americans apparently just don't get it.

read Josh Green's article in the Atlantic and see if you's like to revise your post.

but he ain't young (54 this year). Nothing against the man, but let's be realistic here. Sure he's not necessarily old - when you compare him to McAncient, he looks like a middle-schooler - but he is firmly in the middle age.

why pointing out an opponent's ludicrous stances is termed "negative", especially in this case, where BO has spent weeks, no, months taking the high ground against both HRC and McAncient. if this ad is negative, then the paris hilton/britney spears ad is character assassination, or libel.

mr axelrod, more of this please. how about an ad with nothing but all the gaffes McAncient made and the media ignored while the Dem primary was still on-going. nothing better than using one's opponent's own stupidity against him.

in his legendary stand-up film, "killing them softly", chappelle addresses exactly this kind of garbage that comes from magazines like cosmo. he said the list was only four items long: "suck his dick, play with his balls, fix him a sandwich, and don't talk so much."

spot on.

you forgot your brilliant tagline: "if that's not buying votes, i don't know what is."

if you have nothing valuable to add to the conversation, you can scurry back under that bridge you emerged from, troll.

because unlike HRC, Kerry, and Gore, Obama has "had a voice" from day one. It took humiliating defeats for the the other three to act, look and speak like a president. Gone was the harsh tone of her voice and robotic delivery we all heard during the primaries (although she still needs work on cadence).

Kudos to HRC for a great speech, but maybe, just maybe, if she was a more effective manager of her own campaign and message, she would be the one speaking Thursday night instead of Obama.

is apparently still stuck in the intellectual rut of junior high doesn't mean everything should be dropped to their level. People have been talked down to for the last 8 years and even the middle-schoolers know when they're being patronized. For now, it doesn't help Obama to parrot bullshit reich-wing (er, right-wing) talking points as though that is the logical starting line.

the Dems couldn't ask for anything better than another hurricane bearing down on New Orleans just as the Republican conventions gets underway with good ole Fly Over George. Beautiful.

to discredit these turncoats? drug addicts? race traitors? terrorist coddlers? toddler fondlers?

i think it's M-C-C-A-I-N.

she's been governor for one year and before that a city councilwoman. just TONS of experience there.

talk about a desparation move. stick a fork in old johnny. he's done.

i just choked on my breakfast with that "lieberman dead corpse" line.

the mother of Bristol, Piper, Track, Willow, and Trig.

huh?

how better to highlight the stark differences between McCain's pathetic energy policy and Obama's forward looking embrace renewables than to pick a woman who is beholden to oil companies?

what we need is another person in the white house that sticks to their convictions, however noble, when all other evidence points to the opposite direction.

i am not saying that she should have aborted -- pro-choice means that, pro-choice -- but it shows extraordinarily poor judgment to get pregnant at such an advanced age, when you already have four other children and you can't spend time caring for that child yourself. this isn't an argument that can or should be used in any kind of political debate, but its something that i would consider if she were running even for my local PTA board.

plus, on top of all that, she's a creationist. yikes.

when your resume is as thin as Palin's, how else is one supposed to characterize her? she IS a mother, she WAS a beauty queen.....we can say 'governor for a little over one year' or 'mayor of a town of 8,000'.

come to think of it, 'mother' and 'beauty queen' sound like her most substantial accomplishments; it mean, she's been those two things way longer than anything that would qualify her as VP.

she was a mayor of a town of around 7000. that means that the student body president at ohio state has as much experience. and now she's been governor of a notoriously corrupt state and her big accomplishment is.....a modest tax increase on oil companies? and she found time to abuse her power to get her sister's ex fired.

obama has been involved in public service for 25 years. the management of his campaign alone is more impressive than governing that backwater we call alaska.

we have a bush/cheney redux with this ticket: anti-science, pro-oil/drilling, and under ethics investigation.

dems don't have to touch the experience factor, mccain just picked a vp that echoes the dems tagline: 8 years is enough.

couldn't agree more. we just had an entire convention dedicated to placating supporters of the first woman to be seriously considered for the white house (and the top job at that) and now the news is about a no-name, no-experience, dan quayle lite VP nominee when the Dems did that over 20 years ago? huh?

obama gives a masterful speech combining his well-known rhetoric with meat and potatoes specifics (for which he's been criticized for lacking) and we don't even get two pieces on it?

come on salon, grow up.